Monday, February 16, 2009

The Unit - Recap & Review - The Last Nazi

The Unit“The Last Nazi”

Original Air Date: Feb 16, 2009

Brittany Wells – TwoCents Reviewerbrittanyw@thetwocentscorp.com

It’s been more than a month since the last new episode of The Unit, which, frankly, wasn’t that great. I contented myself by saying, “Oh, the next one will be awesome! Robert Patrick is finally getting a good Tom Ryan-centric episode, and he’ll be fabulous, and maybe we’ll figure out what the heck is going on around here!” If there’s one thing that makes me happy, it’s the promise of a lot of Robert Patrick.

3 comments:

It’s been more than a month since the last new episode of The Unit, which, frankly, wasn’t that great. I contented myself by saying, “Oh, the next one will be awesome! Robert Patrick is finally getting a good Tom Ryan-centric episode, and he’ll be fabulous, and maybe we’ll figure out what the heck is going on around here!” If there’s one thing that makes me happy, it’s the promise of a lot of Robert Patrick.

Then my enthusiasm slowly began to wane. The episode also involved another grating guest appearance from Rebecca Pidgeon (not surprising considering her husband wrote the episode), not to mention the return of two more extraneous characters – the eccentrics last seen in “Switchblade”, another pretty useless episode. The summary didn’t really hint at anything. And I’ve never really seen a show where childhood flashbacks were that good for anything. In fact, I was starting to dread this episode.

I know now that I was right to be worried. This is yet another filler episode – filled with out of character moments, a lackluster plot, and still no answers about a storyline started months ago.

In the storyline that gives the episode its name, the team is dispatched by the President to bring in the former Nazi who supposedly killed the family of one of the President’s biggest political supporters. Now that they know where the guy is, the politico wants to have someone kick his butt, understandably, and so POTUS calls on our boys to do the job before the politico does it himself. I’m wary of the idea that the Unit can be used to run personal missions, but this is the President so I guess he can do what he wants. The team is sent to Switzerland to fetch the Nazi and bring him to the Hague.

This amounts to tracking him down through a priest at a local hospital, who whacks Jonas on the back of the head with his cane sort of like Montgomery Burns and our fearless leader actually gets knocked out cold. Let me repeat: Jonas Blane, built like a brick wall and probably able to snap this guy like a twig, gets knocked out by a haphazard swing by an elderly priest. Uh-huh. Meanwhile, in trying to buy time for Jonas and Bridget at the hospital, Mack and Bob cause a traffic accident between themselves and the bad guys following…and get arrested. Let me repeat that too: two trained Unit operators cause a successful distraction, but are stupid enough to jeopardize the safety of the entire mission by overacting and getting themselves arrested. By the way, this concludes Max Martini and Scott Foley’s contributions to the episode. Jonas ends up in the trunk of a car, dropped on the doorstep of the Nazi, and then…well, I can’t tell you what happens then, for reasons I’ll explain in a second.

The B-story has Tom in Washington being offered a promotion to Brigadier General, which we all know he won’t take since that means leaving the Unit, which would mean leaving the show. He wants some time to think about it, which apparently now means “have a lot of flashbacks to his crappy childhood.” We learn that Tom’s mother was a hooker, his stepfather was abusive, and he once walked in on something he really should have therapy for. None of this really tells us anything, except for that he really kind of hates himself. I can’t see why, considering none of it points to him having done anything wrong, and none of it really fleshes him out too much. We can guess why he enlisted, and his childhood sucked, but how does that impact his decision to make this jump or not? (Then again, this is a character where we don’t know his middle name.) Unfortunately for me, a lot of time is taken up by flashbacks, meaning all I get to see is Robert Patrick looking really confused and breaking down for not much reason.

He never actually makes any decision, which you would think would be the point. No, he spends the whole episode trading some rather heavy-handed rhetoric with Charlotte. Yes, the witch is back. Go figure. She sold him out, betrayed their marriage (which was rushed to begin with), and he not only treats her all friendly last episode, this week he’s in a hotel room with her? In fact, this week, he’s sleeping with her and she’s talking about how she loves him? That was about the moment I felt sick to my stomach and flipped the TV off. Putting aside my dislike of Rebecca Pidgeon, who can make Mamet’s dialogue seem leaden and creepy, this whole development is so out of character for Tom it even makes me disgusted. He was ticked off enough about her selling him out that he divorced her, yet she comes back and he seems to have conveniently forgotten that? They’re talking about loving each other? What kind of love is it when you betray the person you married? I would think he would have the integrity, or at least common sense, to call a spade a spade, but no. Sadly, since the actress is married to the writer I figured this would happen – the better to keep her on the show – but I was hoping not. My hope now is since she’s not showing up for the next few episodes they’ll drop this plot point like they do a lot of things on this show. But now I get to spend the season praying each week she doesn’t come back. For once, I actually didn’t finish an episode.

And why should we bother? Instead of providing us answers to a pretty cool idea – who would be able to target our most powerful people and half succeed at eliminating them – the show resurrects plots and people we don’t need. Regina Taylor comes back to the show, but only to talk in circles with Barry Corbin, who is still as annoying as he was before, bringing back the mystery blonde who Charles impulsively wants to marry. He wants to buy the fictional Aerodyne to get Charles out of the picture. There’s no Tiffy at all (okay, I won’t complain there), and Kim gets all of one scene, to suggest with a smirk that they actually sell the company. Excuse me? This is an elaborately constructed cover established by the U.S. military for your protection. It’s not something you can just get rid of like that old sofa you didn’t like and it’s certainly not amusing.

Add it all up, and it’s another unsatisfying episode in which nothing substantive really happens. There is nothing in this episode that really contributed anything, and certainly didn’t make me feel glad the show was back from a month off, or make me want to watch next week. In the defense of the writers, it must be annoying when the show is mis-scheduled (next week is a repeat again). But they still have to deliver a quality storyline and in a reasonable fashion. The next new episode, in two weeks, deals with Betsy Blane’s press tour after her abduction. Wouldn’t that episode have been better placed after the “Into Hell” two-parter, when that was still fresh in our minds? And why did we really need this episode, when we know Tom can’t take the promotion, Molly can’t really sell a company that doesn’t exist, and capturing a Nazi is pretty inconsequential? With writing like this, The Unit is almost asking to be cancelled, and I dare to say that the constant pre-emptions are a reflection of the network’s continual ambiguity toward the show. They don’t seem that excited about airing it, and at this rate? I’m not all that excited about watching it.

Thanks, Rachel! I wish we would have seen more of him actually acting, though - we saw more of the character, but it was mostly through flashbacks, so as for actual RP screen time it probably wasn't much more than usual. Still, I guess I'm glad we learned a few things about his character, though there are some things I wish I'd never seen.